


Gone Dancing

by jaeled



Category: Agent Carter - Fandom, Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 11:56:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8488468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaeled/pseuds/jaeled
Summary: A piece I did ages ago for Agent Carter Century. My prompt was rock-n-roll. This is set post-First Avenger and was written before the Agent Carter TV show, so it doesn't coincide with the events of the universe any more.





	

When Gabriel Jones catches Peggy alone in her office after hours for the third time in a row, he says Let’s go dancing, as though he doesn’t know what those words mean.

Her breath catches, her pen twitches, leaving a hatch mark across the notes she’s been taking on the latest batch of communications from contacts in the Soviet bloc. Gabe’s eyes stay steady on her face, his expression bland. He knows exactly what those words mean.

Peggy reins her anger in hard.

“Still have some work to finish,” she says, clipped. “Maybe another time.”

He raps a knuckle against her desk. “I’ll hold you to that. Don’t work too hard.”

“Someone around here needs to.” That feels more natural, a common exchange. Safe ground.

Gabe leaves and Peggy stares for a long time at her notes, until the point of her pen goes dry. It takes an irritating amount of scratching to get the ink flowing again, and by then she’s given up on productivity. She packs up and makes her way home in the snow, her car skating through the streets of Wheaton, New Jersey.

Two days later it’s Dugan. He strolls into her office, braces his hands on her desk like an ox braced to charge, and winks. “Come on, Carter. Let’s dance.”

“I will put this pen nib through your eye,” she says, amicable. Dugan laughs, salutes, and makes his exit. Peggy gets up to close her door and sees all five of the Commandos clustered nearby, talking. She glares, and they snap to attention, giving her a collection of salutes and blown kisses that she answers with a not-quite-slammed door.

She can’t help one smile at the frosted glass that bears her name and rank.

Idiots.

The next day it’s Falsworth’s turn. He wanders in to her office in the late evening and Peggy points to the exit. He grins, bows, and deposits a stack of files with a note on top.

It says _You are cordially invited to rediscover existence beyond the confines of SHIELD’s filing system_.

She writes something rude on the back in response and leaves it in his correspondence box.

Dernier brings flowers, and leaves covered in petals. Morita saunters in to find Peggy holding her gun. He does a swift about-face and waves over his shoulder as he leaves.

For three days there’s nothing. Peggy relaxes back into code breaking and data analysis, wryly missing the days when she wasn’t in charge and could look forward to steady assignments in the field. The fourth night, all of the Commandos file in. Dugan has rope over his shoulder. Falsworth carries a blindfold. Gabe is the one who speaks.

“We were going to kidnap you,” he says.

“But, on the whole, we’re rather fond of our manhood,” Falsworth adds.

“Don’t look at me,” Morita says. “I wasn’t even going to try.”

Peggy gives up.

“I am not dancing with any of you,” she says, and gets her coat from the stand by the door.

They go to a club that Gabriel knows, one that sits on the edge of Harlem. They play wartime classics, rhythm and blues, then step it up into something brisk and rollicking with a sax and piano lead that has Peggy tapping her foot against the leg of the table, fairly itching to move. Gabriel watches her with amusement in his eyes.

“Rock the Joint,” he says. “Sure you don’t want to dance?”

Peggy straightens and smooths her skirts and doesn’t deign to reply.

They drop her at her apartment, though exiting Dugan’s very small car is an adventure, and Falsworth says, “Tomorrow, then!”

They drive away before she can say that no, there will not be a tomorrow.

Tomorrow, then, turns out to be a little jazz club in Manhattan, tucked in an out-of-the-way street of the financial district. They play more of the brisk, sax-and-piano music with its snare backbeats, and half the club is dancing while the other half taps their feet. Gabriel knows most of the names of the songs, and asks the band’s leader the rest. The whole band ends up sharing the Commando’s table, flirting with Peggy and sharing war stories with fellow soldiers. There is no one who wasn’t some kind of soldier.

When Gabriel drops her off, half the Commandos still in his car, he says, “See you tomorrow,” and grins.

She throws a snowball at his car and manages not to start laughing until they’re out of sight around a corner.

The next club is close to home, in Brooklyn, owned by an Irish man and second-generation immigrant with a taste for black music his parents never understood. Dugan makes an instant friend and spends half the night working the bar. Gabriel ends up on stage with a borrowed trumpet, and Peggy starts to feel like maybe the War is over after all.

Falsworth keeps Peggy company as the others scatter, to the dance floor, to the women at the bar. She watches and sips her drink and keeps up a flow of conversation with her companion and has the oddest sensation. It registers distantly at first, as she impresses Morita with a whistle of appreciation for the band. As Dugan tops off her glass with some terrible Massachusetts brew he insists is American beer at its finest, never mind that she doesn’t make a practice of drinking the stuff. As Dernier gets up on a table and yells the words to a popular song in French while the others try to pull him down.

It registers slowly, and becomes familiar at last. Happy. She’s happy.

Guilt takes the happiness from her as soon as she knows that it’s there.

Morita pulled the short straw. He’s the only one truly sober by the end of the night, which means it’s him driving Peggy to her Brooklyn apartment after the others have been released to the mercy of their bathrooms and painkillers. She keeps her eyes on the window and tries not to ask herself what Steve would think of the music tonight, how on earth she’d teach him to keep the beat.

“Penny for your thoughts, unless they’re classified,” Morita says.

Peggy blinks. They’re at her apartment. Jim Morita watches her with steady brown eyes, and she reflects on whether he makes himself out to be a brawler on purpose or if the swagger comes naturally. Either way it suits him and it serves him. She remembers, from time to time, that he was the one there when Steve’s call came in. That he was the one Phillips drew out of the room, that he had to have heard those last shared words.

“These little adventures were your idea,” she says.

Morita shrugs.

“Why?”

He runs his hands back and forth over the curve of the wheel, clearly considering his answer. “Because,” he says. “You owed him a dance. And the rest of us could stand to live a little, too.”

Peggy says nothing. She’s not sure what she might find to say. Morita turns on the radio. Rock the Joint pours into the air, and they sit and listen in companionable silence.

The song ends, the trance with it. She leans over and kisses his cheek before she opens her door. “Tomorrow, then,” she says. “Let’s dance.”


End file.
